Two-time winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright program, PEN America, the Centre National du Livre, Villa Gillet, and the Lannan Foundation. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Coffin Factory, and The Southern Review. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he writes a column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review.
His translation of Pierre Bettencourt's "Incidents of Travel Among the Metamorphosians" appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.
Here, Edward Gauvin talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about translation, European fabulism, and internalized habits.
Could you please briefly tell us about the origins (author, historical context, etc.) of this story, “Incidents of Travel Among the Metamorphosians”?
As a writer, Bettencourt was best known for his “fables,” which these days fall somewhere between flash fiction and prose poems. He penned hundreds, much to the disdain of Vichy censors, but shrugged off his friends’ praise, saying he was too influenced by Belgian Henri Michaux, or protesting “Who could claim to be a writer after reading Rabelais?” He was an eccentric whose life, in many ways, rivaled his fiction for strangeness, a world traveler who sojourned in Dar es Salaam, Madagascar, and Vanuatu.
It’s very difficult to establish a Bettencourt bibliography in any way complete or reliable, since almost all his early works were self-published—self-printed, in fact, on a press he bought for 10,000 francs in 1941. He printed his fables in an outbuilding while Nazis were billeted in his father’s house (his mother left when he was seven). He got offcuts from a local stationery shop, which suited his chapbook-sized press. His greatest sorrow was having to melt down an old, barely serviceable set of Elzevir and make new type, but it was a time of scarceness and scrounging. On this tiny press, seven pages at a time, he printed works by playwright Antonin Artaud and poet Francis Ponge. He took unique liberties with his own books, inserting altered banknotes, drops of blood, or such notices as: “This book was printed in an edition limited to 110 numbered copies, of which 25 are scented… Readers who have purchased numbers 26, 48, 69, and 109 will die within the year.”
And how did you come across this text? What was its unique appeal to you?
Over the years, my research into the French and Belgian fantastic has led me down some twisty, obscure alleys. I first heard of Bettencourt from the dryly witty, impeccably dressed Jean-Louis Gauthey, founder of the French indie comics press Cornélius; rather, it was his fervent recommendation over dinner that reminded me I’d seen the name listed, almost as as an afterthought, in the only major histories of the French and Belgian fantastic, by Marcel Schneider and Jean-Baptiste Baronian (respectively).
Thankfully, it’s not hard to get your hands on some Bettencourt these days, for a slight but not outrageous premium. The renaissance of his reputation is based on the rediscovery and re-publication of works old and new almost a generation later, mostly by the small press Les Lettres vives in the early ’90s. Of course, as I’ve noted in a longer biographical piece on him at Weird Fiction Review, Bettencourt comes from an important family, and has always had well-placed fans, like editors Jean Paulhan and José Corti, or writer Marcel Béalu. He just chose to go his own way most of the time. As he once said, “I am a man who never made himself a career.”
“Incidents of Travel Among the Metamorphosians,” a later work, dates from 1983 and was published in a 1994 triptych of stories called Le Piège [The Trap]. Much of what I translate is fantastical; I was looking for something with a science-fictional edge, and in Bettencourt specifically, for a longer piece, as I’d come off reading a lot of his fables. I’ve been gathering the various fantastical tales I’ve published in the last few years with an eye toward an anthology that traces the evolution of the Francophone fantastic from the end of World War II to the present—a period gone missing from literary histories, but during which a great many astonishing things happened, which are just waiting to be brought to light. “Incidents” strikes me as very Calvino-esque, a distinctly European fabulism that developed in reaction both to American SF, which dominated the pulps there, and the legacies of various avant-garde movements gone underground.
What is your first priority when working in the medium of translating someone else’s words? Please explain.
Like writers who can’t move forward till they perfect the first sentence, which somehow informs or begets all sentences to come, I’m a stickler for setting the tone. A bad first step wrongfoots everything else.
Unless perhaps you weren’t referring to “first priority” in terms of process, but aesthetics? The late William Weaver, translator of Calvino and Moravia, identifies a kind of translatorial buck-passing wherein “but that’s what it says” is offered as an excuse for resulting obscurity or obtuseness. You’ve had those conversations, haven’t you, where you and a friend seem to be talking about the same thing only later to realize, when camaraderie or alcohol has abated, that despite using the same words, you weren’t referring to the same things at all? Misapprehension is constant and ubiquitous, but translation, I think, masquerades as a kind of fixative for that: the possibility of agreeing on meaning.
It’s interesting that you refer to translation as a “medium”; rather, I think it’s the process of adapting between the two media of different languages. And each medium has its own constraints: cultural or technical, perceived or imposed.
Have you found that lessons learned from translating text from one language to another have influenced the way you compose your own original writings in English (including, perhaps, everyday things, emails, etc.)? How so?
I’m supposed to speak on this at AWP very soon, so thanks for asking! I better start thinking!
Both languages have distinct syntactical advantages. I don’t think one learns lessons from working so much as internalizes them directly, sometimes as (bad) habits, such that you really have to dredge deep to articulate them. I’m honestly not sure which came first, my love of long lavish Latinate sentences, carefully balanced, or my immersion in French reading. A certain “work amnesia” other writers have talked about results with the products of both writing and translation: you get it out and forget it, though it actually remains a part of you, later surfacing in unexpected ways only a third party can more clearly point out.
I also think translation, like any non-writing profession a writer has, tempts readers with a “handle” that is useful for marketing but not necessarily applicable to the work in question. Bits of biography cloud our readings of things because, thus informed, we go looking for evidence of them, and often as not find them as a result of determined looking. Which is to say, French will always be a valid way of reading my English, but not necessarily the most pertinent.
What writing/translation projects are you working on now?
This is a busy year. I’m looking for an agent for my first story collection, seven stories which came out over the last year in various litmags like The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and Birkensnake. Apart from the aforementioned Francophone fantastical anthology, also seeking a publisher, I’m doing the next 2 Toussaint books for Dalkey. Hopefully, Wakefield Press, the publisher of my recent Ferry collection, will have some good news soon about a certain Belgian fabulist.
Meanwhile, the comics mill keeps turning. Recently, I’ve enjoyed working on Frédérik Peeters’ SF series Aama, a historical epic by Alejandro Jodorowsky (he of the gory, hallucinatory El Topo), and the next volume of Best of Enemies, a history of Arab-American relations by David B. and Jean-Pierre Filiu.
High profile releases for the coming year are probably Ludovic Debeurme's Renée (Top Shelf), Joann Sfar's Pascin (Uncivilized Books), and Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, a prizewinning political satire based on the writer’s time as a speechwriter for former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin during the two crucial years between 9/11 and Gulf 2—remember, when Bush made everyone hate us? It’s sort of a political tell-all meets The Office, with great cartooning by Christophe Blain. Writer Antonin Baudry is now the French cultural attaché at the NY embassy. Apart from the book’s own qualities, this was the first time I've worked so closely with an author whose English was so good, and together we actually adapted/re-wrote parts of the book, moving away from the original text.
Ah yes, and February will bring some other comics excerpts in the annual Graphics Issue at Words Without Borders: Matthias Picard’s Jeanine, the oral autobiography (so to speak) of a prostitute; Nicolas Wild’s Tehran travel memoirs, Silent Was Zarathustra; and the aforementioned Weapons of Mass Diplomacy.
What did you read in 2013 that you want to recommend to the people?
I’m genuinely puzzled by how books find their way into my hands: some mysteriously cut ahead in the to-read line, while others jump in from elsewhere altogether. These lists never seem to match up with my stated intentions or research interests. Maybe I read them to get away from what I do? Over the past year, I enjoyed
the novels
Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman (aka The War of Dreams)
Charles McCarry, The Miernik Dossier
Don Lee, Country of Origin
Steve Weiner, The Museum of Love
the collection
Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
and the graphic novels
Hans Rickheit, The Squirrel Machine
Jason, A Pocketful of Rain and Other Stories
Jim Woodring, Weathercraft
The French digital comics magazine Professeur Cyclope is good fun.
I have trouble keeping track of individual stories and comics issues, but I liked some horror by David Nickle, some Daredevil by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, Prophet by Brandon Graham, poems by Dean Young, and French short stories by Pierrette Fleutiaux, Yvonne Escoula, Sylvain Jouty, Eugène Savitzkaya, and of course, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud.